Facebook’s Statement of Rights and
Responsibilities offers numerous guidelines regarding appropriate speech and
user safety, including an admonition that “you will not bully, intimidate, or
harass any user” and that “you will not post content that: is hate speech,
threatening, or pornographic; incites violence; or contains nudity or graphic or
gratuitous violence.”

But that hasn’t stopped countless users on the social media
site from making comments, posting images and starting pages that promote the
rape and abuse of women. And in many cases, it doesn’t mean that Facebook has
any intention of stopping them, either.

Around Christmastime, an Icelandic woman named T.
A. came across a Facebook page titled “controversial humor – men are
better than women,” and after bantering back and forth with a user whom she
describes as a “troll,” she soon found herself staring back at a photo of
herself posted on the wall. Her user image had been Photoshopped to look like
she had been beaten, with a caption in Icelandic stating, “women are like grass,
they need to be beaten/cut regularly.”

“You just need to be raped,” the commenter told
Agustsdottir.

Agustsdottir reported the image to Facebook, tagging it as
“graphic violence.” A few hours later she received a notice that the image did
not meet the criteria for removal.

She reported the
image several more times over a period of 24 hours, along with numerous other
users, and all received the same response: “This photo wasn’t removed.” Finally,
on New Year’s Eve — more than two days after her initial report — Agustsdottir
contacted an Icelandic media outlet, DV.is, that broke the story, and it was soon picked up by
other Icelandic news sources.

“To my great relief
my countrymen responded swiftly and jumped on the Icelandic ‘report train’ –
fortunately, there is no stopping the report train once it leaves the station,”
Agustsdottir explained in an online account of the incident.

The next day, says Agustsdottir, the image disappeared —
removed either by Facebook or by the user — and not long afterwards the page
itself was gone. Hours after the page was removed, Agustsdottir received yet
another response to a report saying Facebook did not see anything actionable in
its content.